This is the extended version of the edited publication for March RE/Search.

Zora Burden: Will give an introduction to your work as activist, anarchist and organizer?

scott crow: I’ve been an activist for about 25 years. I’ve built a number of worker co-ops and organizations and have been a musician and revolutionary organizer both within and without of the political systems in the U.S. I have identified as an anarchist since the late ‘90s after being disappointed with the limits of most Communist and Socialist organizing models and parties.

Since leaving my bands, I have co-founded many cooperative businesses and projects including my first collective art gallery called Red Square in 1995. After it closed, I co-founded a midcentury antique cooperative called Century Modern. I used Century Modern as a place to organize grassroots efforts out of from 1996-2001, when I left it to return to fulltime grassroots political organizing and movement building. In the late ‘90s I began to embrace the ideas of anarchy both on personal and political levels in addition to other issues I had worked on since the 1980s like: animal liberation, radical environmental issues, prisons, political prisoners in the US and Capitalism, which is destroying our lives for profit as we speak. Over the next several years, I worked freelance for many big and small organizations including Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network and the Ruckus Society on their action teams. I was basically paid to recruit, organize and train activists to do dramatic stunts like hanging off buildings with banners, or creating blockades to generate media attention and put pressure on corporations or governments to do the right thing. It was engaging, but also it was just work. Additionally, I was co-founding other groups and projects working on issues. I ran an activist training camp called the Radical Encuentro from 2000-2007 in Texas. Every six months, 200- 300 activists would learn the skills of civil disobedience, collective organizing and the ideas of anarchy.

In 2005, when New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, I was there two days later to start an organization called the Common Ground Collective, which was to be the largest anarchist inspired organization in modern US history. We had over 35,000 volunteers come through in the first three years, most weren’t anarchists but the foundations of the organization were. What made it anarchist? We operated as network instead of a single entity, we used group and share decision making, we came from the ideas of using direct action of not waiting on governments or others to do the right thing but doing it ourselves. We carried guns in defense of black communities against white racists and we supported communities in rebuilding their lives on their own terms. We built seven free health clinics, opened free schools, created localized food security through free community gardens, cleaned garbage, held neighborhood assemblies and discussions on what to do. But more importantly, we did this without government assistance and lots of government interference. The police tried to kill me, and others, on four occasions and we were chronically harassed in the first year by agencies despite our good will within the communities and our track records. After coming back out of New Orleans, and while trying to recover form Post Traumatic Stress from all the violence, I co-founded a thrift store project called Treasure City Thrift, named after a discount store from my childhood, to fund other local anarchist and radical projects that couldn’t get funding because they were too small or more often, too controversial. I also worked at an anarchist worker cooperative recycling center called Ecology Action, which at the time was the oldest worker cooperative in Texas. Then came writing my books and touring again, but this time as a speaker. From 2006, onward, I felt compelled to write and heal while being under intense surveillance. So I’ve spent a lot of time doing that and touring parts of the world sharing those experiences and ideas with audiences and hopefully co-conspirators. And remember, during all of this time from about 1999, I was on the FBI’s list of alleged domestic terrorists for my political activities and put under intense surveillance and harassment which increased after 9/11/2001. All of this, despite never having been convicted of any violent activities in my life. So since the millennium it’s been a pretty intense ride.

ZB: When did you first learn about being listed as a domestic terrorist and how did this affect your life over the years? How do you cope, what kind of legal defense was required?

sc: To give my situation some context, we have to remember that political dissidents, artists and radicals of all stripes in the US have always been under surveillance since the formation of the FBI in the 1930s. First with the Anarchists at the turn of the 20th century and then the Communists in the 40s-70s. Since the late 90s and into today, the FBI targets have been animal rights activists, radical environmentalists, anarchists and Muslims. I was lucky in that all my political life, I’ve engaged in three of the four domestic priority categories. (laughs) Since I began my social and political engagements in 1985, there has always been some low level surveillance, both for intimidation and to gather information in my life usually at demonstrations. I wasn’t necessarily targeted as much as swept up by mass information gathering from the rooftops of buildings etc. Then in 1999, the FBI first visited me at my business at Century Modern, a cooperative antique shop in Dallas. All of the questions were about animal rights activity and property destruction at nearby fur stores, which was happening at the time. It was straight up intimidation in front of my business co-owners. The agent tried to intimidate me by suggesting it was myself or someone I knew, who was committing these acts of sabotage. That started a long journey of being surveilled and harassed by law enforcement at all levels until at least 2012, which was largely directed and by the FBI and coordinated through the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Part of the time, when it was all happening, I didn’t really care. I just took it as part and parcel of choosing a revolutionary path for liberation, but they stepped up their campaign in 2003. And remember, at the time all of this was happening I suspected it but had no idea the depth it was at. I am not sure if it was survival or if I was being oblivious. So after 2003, it gets to where I can’t fly without being deeply questioned or refused flights, so I stopped flying. Multiple agencies began sitting in front of my house for three years. Many times I was arrested at protests, the FBI always happens to be on hand to try to question me in jail. They go through my garbage, they visit me at home, work and spaces I attend, and they started visiting friends of mine around the country. The FBI also tried to stop me from legally purchasing a firearm on four occasions. All of this shit was done in secret.

In 2006, I was kicked off of political prisoner Herman Wallace of the Angola 3’s visiting list “due to information received from outside law enforcement”. I had visited him in prison since 2001 and been a key organizer on their campaign for years. That letter was the first tangible confirmation of what was happening. And finally, it was fully revealed that a friend of mine, at the time, a man named Brandon Darby, had been secretly working for the FBI as an informant. He was someone I had taken up arms with against the white militias and the New Orleans police who were trying to kill people after Katrina. In 2008, he had helped entrap two other friends at the Republican National Convention. After those revelations in 2008, an activist legal collective in Austin filed Freedom of Information Act requests on my behalf and some documents were released. To date, we only have twelve hundred, of about thirty thousand pages of documents. The documents did reveal the depth and scope of the investigations, which took place at all levels of law enforcement across thirteen FBI field offices in five states. They had basically tried to imprison me, and many others around me for our political beliefs and actions.Some revelations are that Darby had been the fifth informant in my life since 2001 and the second to try to get me to commit crimes, which would have terrorism enhancement.During this time, there were about thirty other white activists across the US going to prison and being targeted for the same stuff, while hundreds of Muslim people were being targeted. They went through my garbage, tapped my phone and internet, visited me at work and home, sent out BOLO’s (be on the look-out) posters across the country, interviewed my known associates and built a huge dossier on me because I advocated for animal liberation, radical environmental ideas and was an anarchist. It was the new Red Scare of the 1950s reset for the 21th century. I was only able to walk away from it all safely because I am a white, fast-talking male, with tons of support and lawyers. They tried to indict me in three secret grand juries but weren’t able to. And the irony is that when it was all happening, I could only suspect from the obvious things what was happening, I had no idea of the depth of it all. I will also say the FBI and other agencies are idiots. With all of their resources they are still blind to the world around them.

ZB: Did you have any mentors or inspirations politically growing up or as an adult?

sc: That is such a complex question in that I can think of many people who have influenced my ideas, growth, reflections by their words, deeds or lives and I would look up to at different stages of growth or development in my life. Some of those, in no particular order, would be: my mum, anarchist Emma Goldman, and Subcomandante Marcos, who is a leader and spokesperson for the E.Z.L.N.- a revolutionary movement and organization of indigenous in Chiapas, Mexico. Marcos is a brilliant and prolific post-modern writer and his words and ideas, as well as the E.Z.L.N.’s, have influenced me greatly on many levels from writing to political analysis. I actually have found lots of mentors in my life but generally see people more as collaborators these days, not because I can’t learn more but because I see learning as collaboration. I find inspiration in different ways from others. Some it is their writing, others it’s their art, while others it’s the lives they live. If I had to say whom I would include these days, it would be my lifelong partner Ann Harkness first. She is my counsel and inspiration and a hell of a good sounding board. Additionally, I would add John P. Clark, an anarchist writer and former professor at Tulane University, and Robert Hillary King, of the Angola 3, a former member of the Black Panther Party and former political prisoner. Both are good friends with long lives behind them and great perspectives.

ZB: Will you talk about how you used your music as a platform for political or social change?

sc: To answer that, let me back up a bit to give context in how music influenced and changed my life and why and how I consciously used it later to educate and spread marginal or under-represented ideas. I spent some of my formative years in a working class farm town of Garland, Texas, outside Dallas. A place that eventually became a dead suburb, decades after I left, like all the other farm towns around us. I wasn’t exposed to that much culture about the world, politics or philosophy, outside of the basics within school, but I listened to music a lot. Music saved my life during those alienated and nihilistic days under the shadow of Reagan, showing me a way out of the life I was living. Without the exposure music gave me to cultural and political information, I would have been at a dead end like those around me. I desperately gained access to shared emotions and thoughts that kept me from feeling alienated and isolated. I had grown up listening to country music and later bloated album rock that was on the radio. Then punk and new wave hit. I was on the outer edges of the small Dallas punk scene; it didn’t speak to my angst, nihilism or need to escape. I did get early political education and exposure rather from the industrial music scenes that were coming up in the mid to late 1980’s. Bands like Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Dept., Consolidated, Skinny Puppy, Cabaret Voltaire and Ministry. The combination of clanging metal and industrial beats combined with the severe imagery, visceral videos and performances and the political lyrics inspired me more than fast guitars. A short example of this, is when I had read an interview in 86’ with Al Jourgensen of Ministry, describing in detail the issues of working-class and blue-collar people. His descriptions of neighborhoods and environments sounded just like my life. It was the first time I had concepts that related to what I had felt and thought. His words exposed the differences between the American dream and my life’s actuality. Music, both listening to it and producing it, was my only way out. I quit high school my senior year, in 1985, to attend college to study music in a nearby town for a few months before failing out in less than a year. In that short time, I was exposed to a lot being in that environment. Theater and art shows, late night discussions on politics, religion, and philosophy, and some acid trips. The entire curriculum expanded my thinking but I knew college wasn’t for me. During this time, I had been exposed to industrial music and ambient music coming out of Europe like Soviet France, Throbbing Gristle, Eno and poignantly enough, I had picked up a copy of a mind blowing book called the Industrial Culture Handbook from RE/Search from a small bookstore in Texas. That book became a much-referenced bible of sorts for my friends and me during those formative music and political years. While enrolled in college, but not attending, a friend and I did an experimental electronic noise and ambient project called Corporate Uncle. The project used found sounds, electronics and audio clips from TV to create layers. It was very influenced by Soviet France in the collage sounds but also the packaging. We released about 200 copies of our tapes, each with its own handmade chicken wire and bolt wrapped cover in numbered editions. It was my first foray into mixing crude politics and social commentary with sounds. A far cry from the metal bands I had been in. I started buying more electronic gear, learning MIDI and building a small studio with my meager funds from working at a record store, so I could make music on my own. In 1988, my mom scraped together some money and we both went to Europe. We had hardly ever been out of Texas at that time. It was my chance to shop my demo tapes to record labels and to explore what I perceived to be more developed politics and culture. In four months, I never got a record deal, but I did get a crash course in being a more politically educated American. Once back home, I began to write more overtly political lyrics and promoted political ideas to educate people on issues and hopefully move them to action through music. It had affected me profoundly and that maybe I could do the same for others. From the late 1980s until the early ’90s, I co-founded and fronted two political industrial-techno bands, LesSon SeVen and Audio Assault. We had songs produced by MC 900 Ft. Jesus (aka Mark Griffin) and Information Society. We didn’t release that much material. Our first 12” single was Radiation on Oak Lawn Records, label home to bands C.C.C.P., Microchip League and Voyou. The song was basically a tongue in cheek sound collage, on top of driving dancing beat about the dangers of nuclear fallout. That release was followed by two mini cassettes and one split CD release (between Lesson Seven and Audio Assault) on Crystal Clear records and some compilation CD’s from radio station KDGE in Dallas.

Lesson Seven toured with bands such as Skinny Puppy on the VIVISectVI tour, Nine Inch Nails and Die Warzau in the 90s. Throughout the 80s and 90s we also performed often with Consolidated, Meat Beat Manifesto, Swans, Psychic TV, Front Line Assembly, Revolting Cocks, Clan of Xymox, Laibach, Weathermen, Diamanda Galas, Severed Heads and others. Those shows were our platform talking about social justice and liberation from the stage. Many of the industrial bands at that time highlighted social issues and their music had influenced me to dig deeper. Now we were performing and touring together. The bands I was in continued traveling, distributing literature, and raising money for a variety of groups from town to town. I spoke from the stage about many issues that I now saw as connected: women’s liberation, animal rights, racism, the AIDS epidemic, abortion access, and the U.S. war machine, which was in high gear. Remember we used to worry about Reagan fucking pushing the button to start nuclear war. The hours were grueling and long but I believed in dismantling the oppressive systems and creating social change, even if I was unsure of what that would be. I thought that we could protest and vote our way to a better world if everyone got educated on the issues. It was standard old school organizing. By morally outraging people, we could bring them to act, which meant making an appeal to power to make changes. Finally, in 1992, I exited stage left, leaving both bands after seven years of constant shows and touring. I left the music industry. It was too much industry and not enough music, politics, or steady income. The story of most artists isn’t it? I turned my back on the music industry and to producing music for almost fifteen years. I found other ways to engage in political and social change. And have only returned to it again in the last two to three years. I recently added vocal tracks to anarchist hip hop artist Sole, who co-founded the influential conscious hip hop label Anticon back in the 90s and DJ Pain1‘s last record Nihilismo. And now a handful of international underground noise groups have been using excerpts from my talks over the last ten years as cut ups in their sound collages. I’ve been buying gear and writing political lyrics again, in addition to writing books.

Form my experiences, I think there is a big divide between culture makers and most political or social agents. In political circles- and I am not talking about party politics at all here- the impacts from culture and culture makers, whether its musicians, filmmakers or ‘fine artists’ are often under-rated or largely overlooked, within social political movements and scenes. I have always thought it was a shame. Sure there are exceptions and examples where it’s been very influential, like the way punk rock, or industrial music used to be in the 80’s and early 90’s, or the way that the new underground DIY noise and electronic scenes have flourished in the last decade. But generally activists and political organizers never dive into the arts potential to motivate and reinforce valuable visions and ideals and messages. On the flip side, political culture makers are often isolated themselves into the subcultures of which they exist and don’t often make the connections outside of it either. Or when they do, they produce political work that’s not very deep or meaningful except in that culture vacuum. Like Chuck D of Public Enemy said in Revolverlution when he’s talking about lyricists being short sighted about the bigger political picture. “Let's call it raptivism, since a lot of MCs be stuck on isms, as in sexism, self- hate, racism.” The mirror of self-reflection in both of those places is more isolated from each other. I am working now to bring it together again through producing my own music, but also connecting artists and grassroots political movements and spaces together.

ZB: Will you talk about some of the books you've written and lectures you’ve conducted?

sc: I consider myself much more of a raconteur or storyteller than a writer. Writing is something I do to be in the world to share stories and as a writer, I usually write autobiographically. It’s hard for me to pretend to be objective, for example, if I am writing about political or social movements. My first book was Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective, which came out in 2011. It’s part personal memoir, part grassroots political organizing manual and part political movement history with a primary focus on my organizing efforts after Hurricane Katrina through an organization I co-founded called the Common Ground Collective. The book illustrates how Anarchists were able to gather twenty-eight thousand people, over the first three years, to fight police and corruption and work with the residents to rebuild their neighborhood and communities without government help or interference. I think the book resonated well. Since its release, a second edition, as well as Spanish and Russian editions of it have come out. After that books release, I spent almost five years touring the US, Mexico, England, Canada and Russia doing over three hundred presentations at universities and community spaces and everything in between talking about the practical ways that the ideas of anarchy have been and are put into practice and using it as a tool for communities to organize themselves without governments, corporations or the nonprofit industrial complex. Since then, I had a couple of other books come out including Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams: A scott crow Reader, which was a collection from talks and selected interviews from the last 5-6 years and Witness To Betrayal, a book about my complex relationship with an FBI informant, and former friend who tried to put me in prison, and I contributed a piece to collected anthology called Grabbing Back: Against the Global Land Grab (AK Press). I have two forthcoming books out in 2018; Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense (PM Press), which is a provocative anthology on the use of guns as part of localized collective liberation efforts, and another memoir My Dangerous Years: A Memoir of Surveillance, Spying, and the War on Dissent 1999-2012 about living under surveillance as an FBI target for alleged domestic terrorism for over a decade beginning in 1999.

ZB: Which authors or books inspired your political work in your formative years and throughout your work?

SC: I have been a voracious reader, so it’s a hard list to make. As I mentioned Subcomandante Marcos, who is a very prolific writer, which influenced me more than anything. There are so many to draw from, but reaching back, Industrial Culture Handbook by RE/Search was pretty influential on my music and politics, Manufacturing Dissent by Noam Chomsky, The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J Adams, anything by Flannery O’Conner, Zora Neale Hurston, Brion Gysin, Terrance McKenna, philosopher Jacques Derrida, a book called This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and many of the classic Beat poets and writers work heavily shaped my world. In addition, there are literally piles of zines and books from unknown people who have remained in my active libraries.

ZB: What do you think political activists are facing under Trump given his disregard for the First Amendment and the Constitution entirely.

sc: Depending on which group of activists we’re referring to, I think pretty well despite the rhetoric so far. Liberals and the mainstream, have barely looked at them before or the very social ills of Capitalism and the radical ideas that might replace it - which Anarchists, revolutionaries, and radicals have always been promoting. Ideas like community armed self-defense, confronting anti-fascists online and in the streets, shutting down pipelines, that black and immigrants lives do matter, that corporations have been destroying the world through economics, labor and the environment while reaping huge profits from it all, that we cannot count on governments to save us. These are just some of many ideas that have gained a lot of ground. Conversations, actions and media platforms we didn’t have 5-10-20 years ago, are now available. These are watershed moments. Also, the ideas of anarchy have taken root on both the traditional left and right spectrums in different flavors. People are sick of bosses, and political leaders telling us what to do and failing. People and communities are finding and stretching their own voices to stop the violence on their communities, whether it’s the police and prisons, documentation and immigrations, access to clean water, or the ability to decide their own fates. They are also beginning to ask what it is they want. How do we want to live if governments and corporations are failing? That said, this is both a time of great trials and tribulations, and times of great openings to push in new and different directions than we have before. For example, if the government defunds Planned Parenthood, NPR or the National Endowment of the Arts - instead of begging them to reconsider or fight for them to continue, we have other paths. We can reject the old Left that they have to provide these things or a Libertarian option that ‘free markets’ will decide the fate of these organizations. Instead new paths open where we can say fuck the government, fuck the Libertarian-right! if we decide we can fund them ourselves because enough of us see value in them. And I bet people would. Look at the ACLU - they raised twenty-four million dollars in three days. The most they had ever raised in fifty years and the reason is because enough of us saw value in that. And if we look at the anarchist ideas of direct action: anarchy is in ascension. Fascists and proto-fascists can’t publicly speak or communicate online without being shut down by antifascists, who have been stopping them. Direct action gets the goods. People aren’t going to wait anymore. As activist and poet June Jordan once said, ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for’. And she’s right. I don’t care whether we call it anarchy or blue potato, it’s the liberatory ideas and actions against the Empire and against the fascists creeps that thousands, if not millions have awakened to and are fighting, while also beginning to dream of other futures. I am hopeful, but not Pollyanna. We have to see these tensions of both the worst and best of times. The future is unwritten and wide open despite how things look. Every moment is a new chance. We are standing on the edge of those futures at every turn, so how is it going to look?

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